Thursday, 5 March 2009

Fucking Telefonica

Saga runs as follows.

Go back to Spain and discover router doesn't work. Probably died in one of the storms/heavy rains. Don't see why but anyway it was dead. A few weeks after the warranty ran out but no doubt that is coincidental.

Order new one from Telefonica. It will take a week says unhelpful man. Can they speed it up, I ask? Unhelpful man said he would try but it was unlikely. Despite the fact that when I originally contracted for ADSL the router arrived in three days.

One week later what happens? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No fucking router and no message from the courier company meant to be delivering it. I hoped it might arrive early the next morning when we were due to go back to Gib. No.

I rang Telefonica and asked if they could leave it with the neighbours. Did they have a mobile? No, for fucks sake, they are 80+ years old and actually do not need a mobile - but they are always in. No, that wasn't good enough. So no Telefonica router, I cancelled it.

A few weeks later I took a spare router that I had back to Spain. Connected it up. It worked fine in as much as the ADSL line was functioning and the router and the computer acknowledged each other. But there was a problem with getting onto the internet.

So I rang Telefonica's technical department (Spanish-speaking only) so I could key in the right numbers. Nope. Can't help, there is a problem with your router, you haven't bought it from us. At which point I decided to cancel the ADSL contract.

I rang the English-speaking department ie sales (Telefonica doesn't provide any technical back-up in English, once you have bought a service you need to speak in Spanish if you have any technical problems - but contracts and stuff are dealt with in English).

Apparently I can't cancel because I need to pay the latest bill first. (Bills are sent monthly and around a month in advance).

Fast forward and I pay the bill. I ring up to cancel. I ring up from Gib, so not able to use the freephone service, but paying for an international call. So to cancel I need to provide my passport number. Gets passport and reads off number. No. Not right. Yes, it is. No it isn't.

It seems Telefonica wants the passport number I gave when I originally got the telephone line. Some years ago and since when I have changed passports. How many people carry round an old passport on the off chance they will need it to cancel a service? Well not me for one. 'What if I can't find it?' 'Well that will be very difficult because you need it to cancel this,' she said.

Just why, why, do I have to provide an out-of-date passport number to cancel a service, when I don't have to provide any ID to take it on in the first place? Hauls all paperwork out of cupboard to see if anything had a pre 2005 passport number. Find something.

Ring back. Get helpful Ricardo. He tells me he needs to put a request into the technical department and then I will get a letter asking me to confirm that I want to cancel. That is all I have to do. Really? I thought all I had to do was ring saying I wanted to cancel. I wait patiently for Ricardo to come back to tell me that the request has gone through. I listen to some shit music (note to Telefonica - change that vile music). I swear I will scream if it starts up again. It does. I back out of screaming.

Ricardo doesn't come back. The automated voice message - in Spanish - asks me to rate Telefonica's service following the conclusion of my query (????). So on a scale of 0-9 how satisfied was I? And on a scale of 0-9 would I recommend Telefonica to my friends? No.

ETA This is not a rant about whether Telefonica provides an English-speaking service (which is more than BT would do for Spaniards) it is purely about the difficulty in cancelling a service. I can provide a different rant about their linguistic policy.